


'Cause I'm with You

by tangyyyy



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Amnesia, Angst and Feels, Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-29
Updated: 2019-03-29
Packaged: 2019-12-26 05:38:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18276881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tangyyyy/pseuds/tangyyyy
Summary: This is set on the helicarrier during the fateful confrontation of Bucky and Steve and written in alternating POVs. They're fighting two wars- Cap versus the Winter Soldier and themselves versus the turmoil. All dialogue is from the film Captain America: The Winter Soldier; I just added the thoughts and emotions because I like making people squirm. There's also a little bit of comforting softness if you squint hard enough...





	'Cause I'm with You

**_WINTER SOLDIER_ **

 

I glare at the man. He stares back stonily, his fiery gaze unwavering.

 

_ Locate, process, exterminate. _

 

Unfamiliar navy blue headpiece. Unfamiliar navy blue suit. Unfamiliar navy blue-ringed shield. 

 

Baby blue eyes— steady, watchful.

 

_ Irrelevant to the mission at hand. _

 

_ Locate, process, exterminate. _

 

“You know me.”  _ I know him? _

 

I bark out a short laugh— forced— and crack my knuckles. Hydra said that this was a standard mission. I must follow standard protocol.  _ There is nothing different about this man.  _ But then . . . 

I shake my head, momentarily confused. There was something awfully grounding about his voice that stirred up a vision of an etched dog tag, rusty with blood, tears, and sweat. I remember a skinny blond kid, backed up against an alley, crouching and folding into his small frame. I remember marching on a battlefield, on scorched earth, hot with scarlet, crimson blood. I remember the cold and blinding white eating away at the raw, reduced stump of my arm. I remember pitching down, my bloody body sprawled int the snow. But that can’t be. _ I’m still here. _

 

I may have known him, but I don’t now. Enough is enough. The past is the past. That man— the boy— is beyond me now, and all I have to do is  _ focus. Accomplish this mission. _

 

Still, a persistent echo of his voice shrieks into my head—  _ you’ve known him, you knew him, you know him.  _ I feel a red flash creep up behind my eyelids. I lunge and shout— at both the man and the voices in my head— “No, I don’t!” I pull back my arm and allow Hydra training to take over. A fist connects with his stomach. I don’t feel it, but that’s because my arm is metal. I don’t feel anything.

 

The man thuds on the ground at the edge of the helicarrier. Clanging shrapnel and brittle cement spark down around us, and I hear a pained shriek below us.  _ Collateral damage. _ I adjust my creaking arm.

 

He pushes himself up on one elbow and grunts. I have to lean in to hear him; he’s whispering what seems almost like a mantra.  _ Well, pray, little boy in a costume armed with a frisbee, pray. _ Then I hear it. 

 

“Bucky,” he utters, “Bucky.”  _ Who the hell is Bucky?  _ That’s the second time he’s called me that. This madness needs to stop; he must have mistaken me for someone else.

 

**STEVE ROGERS**

 

“You know me,” I had said. There’s simply nothing else I am more sure of than this.

 

Now, his name is a prayer on my lips.  _ Bucky, my best friend. Forget the Winter Soldier, code name 32557,Sergeant James Barnes. You’re Bucky— confidant, patriot, and all-around flirt.  _ Please remember- please remember yourself. Please remember me.

 

He’s quiet. Calculating. Somehow, the eerie silence hurts me more than the punch, which I’m barely registering.  _ I could do this all day. _

 

“You’ve known me your entire life!” The shout is ripped from me, and I grimace from the cutting pain of the memories.

 

**_WINTER SOLDIER_ **

 

“You’ve known me your entire life!” His face twists— most possibly with the effort of holding himself up. That punch must have been especially effective. I absentmindedly adjust my arm again and reel it back for another blow.  _ The punk.  _ I rear back and continue with my fist. This static is familiar. I can work with silence.

 

I don’t feel anything.

 

**STEVE ROGERS**

 

I wish I could tell what he was feeling.

 

**_WINTER SOLDIER_ **

 

I’m about to throw yet another punch at him when he speaks up raggedly. “Your name,” he gasps, stumbling backwards with a hand pressing protectively against his solar plexus, “is James Buchanan Barnes.”

 

Who? That can’t be me. _ I’m the Winter Soldier. I have no other identity. I have been sent to locate, process, and exterminate.  _ “Shut up!” I scream.  _ Shut up, shut up, shut up, you utter bastard.  _ Clenching my fist— the fleshed one, trying to will in some grounding feeling— tightly, I glance at him again in an effort to analyse him.

 

**STEVE ROGERS**

 

He looks tired. Pale and wanting, with a certain violent hunger.

 

He’s just like me. He’s just a man. What has Hydra done to him? No. He’s just a boy in a new, crisp, pressed uniform.

 

I can’t fight a boy.

 

**_WINTER SOLDIER_ **

 

He’s quiet.  _ Finally.  _ His gaze is focused on something behind me; it’s almost as if he’s looking through me, but there is nothing to see. I allow myself a more thorough look at him.

 

His ridiculous headpiece is off, revealing a shock of wispy blond hair. His discouraged look throws me off, as does the blood on his lip. He’s hurt.

 

I did that. I hurt him.

 

_ I’d do it again. _

 

I regain my composure, repeatedly socking him in the stomach, brushing my leg through the air to crush him down against the fragile glass of the helicarrier’s belly. I stand and hold my ground, and he raises his arms in defeat. I raise my eyebrows.

 

**STEVE ROGERS**

 

“I’m not going to fight you.”  _ I can’t. He was my best friend. _

 

_ He is still my best friend, somewhere deep down in him. _

 

I let go of my shield. It rains down along with the wreckage, and joins the growing pile of crude metal at the Potomac River down below. It’s over.  _ He’s my friend, and he’ll always be. _

 

I look at him and almost smile. “You’re my friend.”

 

**_WINTER SOLDIER_ **

 

_ Friend? Friends don’t exist in this world. Not in this realm. _

 

I launch myself at him seconds after he abandoned his only weapon, and he collapses. His body goes slack and he stops struggling, but his eyes— _why_ _so blue, blue, blue?—_ glare into mine.

 

And so I continue. And so he endures hit after hit after blow. Who knew how much time had passed before I became aware of our surroundings? The helicarrier is shuddering now, and smoke spews dreadfully out of its engines. It’s going to crash any time now.

 

“You’re my mission.” I grit my teeth and glower down at his peaceful face,  _ that smug punk _ . It hurts, my head does, but the arm that keeps up the rhythm of pummelled punches does not feel anything. “You’re. My. Mission.”  _ Why doesn’t he hit me back?  _ “You’re! My! Mission!” I let loose a guttural scream. Nothing makes sense, but this does.  _ He’s my mission. _

 

**STEVE ROGERS**

 

_ He’s my friend. _ I can’t. I can’t.

 

**_WINTER SOLDIER_ **

 

I’ve gone wild, hitting randomly and with no clean purpose. I never do that.  _ Finish the mission. _

 

“You’re my mission.” This time, it comes out torn. Desperate.  _ Weak. _

 

“Then finish it,” he rasps with painful effort, his chin wobbling and tears apparent in his blue, blue blue eyes, “‘cause I’m with you ’till the end of the line.”

 

**STEVE ROGERS**

 

I hope that this is enough for him. I hope that this is enough for the both of us.

 

**JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES**

 

His wavering voice is barely a whisper, but it still thickens and cracks with emotion— emotion that defines decades of fear, pain, and torment. Of love, understanding, and companionship. Of friendship.

 

I stop with a sudden halt as the visions fly back to me, so fast I can barely register each and every one of them. Memories eat at me. “ _ I’m with you ‘till the end of the line, pal,” _ my own voice, except softer, worn, and faithful— the voice of a good man— echoes back faintly at me. A broken promise broken between two broken people sharing a broken past. 

 

I remember. He’s my partner, the piece of me that has been missing for seventy years.  _ Seventy years _ . 

 

Somehow, we were destined to meet one another again. Here we are, in the face of death, in the midst of chaos, in the rise of war.

 

I knew him.

 

I know him.  _ You’re my best friend,  _ I want to say.

 

**STEVE ROGERS**

 

We’ve always been thick as thieves, the two of us. Too bad that one thing we’ve never been good at was timing.

 

**JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES**

 

A monster of a boulder smashes through the deck and tear a hole through the main engine, which begins to sputter. The helicarrier veers off dangerously.

 

**STEVE ROGERS**

 

The world is tilting. Everything is upside down, but he’s holding me right side up.

 

**JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES**

 

This poor excuse of a helicarrier spirals and pitches us downwards. We fall at an alarming speed, and dust and shrapnel blind us from each other. I try to grab the man and hold him up— Steve, my best friend— but my metal arm fails. It never fails. I should have known that Hydra memorabilia would be good for nothing.

 

Helplessly, I watch him slide over the edge of the aircraft.

 

**STEVE ROGERS**

 

How fitting that this time it’s me who is robbed of a proper goodbye. I slip and fall, and pray that the water takes me quick, faster than the snow and Hydra had for Bucky, my confidant, my right-hand man, my best friend.

 

**JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES**

 

No, he can’t be gone. What now? Is the universe so cruel to abandon me He’s counting on me, of course he is.

 

I’m about to leap in after him just as my step falters. I have a choice to make. Do I want to be Bucky? Do I want the past that’s been handed back to me? Do I want to be the best friend of a scrawny boy from Brooklyn? I can have it all back, but I do not know anymore.

 

I do not feel anything.

 

I jump down the side and tuck my legs up to my chest, hitting the cold water where the ripples curl up and embrace me. The impact comes as a shock, and I gasp with feeling. I straighten out and begin to swim for him.

 

Do I want what has been offered to me— a broken past? I can be mended. We all can be.

 

Perhaps one day we’ll be together again, the way we were back at the dark alleyway with haphazardly stacked garbage cans. There’s a certain something beautiful about the impossible. I tell myself that I do not feel, but I choose to believe in this daydream.

 

Give me a second chance, pal.

 

_ ‘Cause I’m with you ‘till the end of the line. _

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Let me know if there's anything you'd change; I had a lot of fun writing this and it'd be great to receive some feedback. All suggestions and comments are welcome.


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